Seventy years ago to this day, the Soviet Army liberated the death camps Auschwitz I and II. Almost ten years ago, the anniversary was designated International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Although I’ve been reflecting on representations of the Holocaust in art, literature, and philosophy for many years, I remain irritatingly little affected by today’s date, January 27. In most European countries, official events will once again collectively recall that breach of civilization and commemorate those who were systematically murdered. So too will Germany. Here, the decision to officially commemorate the victims of the Holocaust on this day was reached in 1996—not least becausethe fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, threatened to overshadow the other watershed events in twentieth-century German history that took place on the same date: the November Revolution of 1918, the Hitler putsch of 1923 and, notably, the “Kristallnacht” of 1938. By contrast, the date of January 27 had never played a prominent role in the post-war remembrance culture of West Germany. Which is perhaps why this anniversary still doesn’t really touch my heart.

A photo from the so-called “Auschwitz Album” that was used as evidence in the Auschwitz Trial, inter alia. An SS officer, (presumably either Ernst Hofmann or Bernhard Walter) took this photo of Hungarian Jews’ arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau in late May or early June 1944. Those pictured here awaiting so-called “selection” on the ramps have not yet been identified. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives).

Auschwitz became synonymous for the systematic murder of European Jews even before the Cold War had ended. This was due not so much to the photos taken by Soviet soldiers of the prisoners in the camps after liberation as to those taken by the SS of deportees on the ramps at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Literary accounts of the latter, such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz (written in 1945–47 and published in 1958) or Jean Améry’s autobiographical collection of essays At the Mind’s Limit (1966), and the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1963–65) cemented the pivotal role played by Auschwitz in collective consciousness. Unlike abstract terms such as “Holocaust,” “Shoah,” and “genocide,” the word Auschwitz, as Adorno noted, represented a concrete place and the inconceivable extermination of human beings and the erasure of their names. It is only logical that the day when Auschwitz ceased to be a death camp was seized as an opportunity to commemorate the nameless that were murdered here.

But the importance of Auschwitz in today’s memory of the Holocaust does not account for the UN General Assembly’s designation of January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day alone, for the day also marks the implementation of a resolution taken in the year 2000 by Stockholm’s “International Forum on the Holocaust.” The Remembrance Day illustrates the so-called “universalization of the Holocaust,” echoed in Jan Eckel and Claudia Moisel rightful claim that “no other historical event has come anywhere near attaining such broad international significance.” On January 27, collective memory in Germany becomes part of this global act of commemoration. The homeland of the perpetrators and their descendants now remembers its systematic mass murder on the same day as countries such as the Czech Republic and Greece do—countries that were once under German occupation.

Footage of the Ayalon highway in Tel Aviv, taken while the sirens wail for Yom HaShoah, Video: Hanok Dakar
In Israel, by contrast, another day is of major importance. There, they commemorate the extermination of European Jews on the 27th day of the Jewish calendar month Nissan by bringing public life to a standstill for two minutes. Before this haunting form of collective commemoration on Yom HaShoa was introduced, practicing Jews, particularly those in the US, used to commemorate the Holocaust on the ninth day of the month of Av, which is Tisha b’Av, the day of fasting that recalls the Destruction of the Temple. Rabbi Manuel Saltzman once described the connection between these two events with the words,

“Jews [all over] the world gather in synagogues on the holiday of Tisha b’Av [Ninth of Av] to commemorate the great calamities which befell our people in our past history and culminat[ed] in the tragic extermination of six million Jews in our day. We [will] never forget these martyrs and [pray] that all mankind will remember them.“ (Cited in: Hasia R. Diner, We Remember with Reverence and Love)

Only those who allow themselves to be moved by an event can commemorate it; only those who are really touched will remember. The act demands a framework that may indeed be collective in character, but doesn’t necessarily have to be. The collective that commemorates the Holocaust and its victims on January 27 is less universal than its international framework suggests—the day that reminds me of Auschwitz is different.

Mirjam Wenzel, Media

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/01/holocaust-remembrance-day/feed/0“One of these days I’m going to tell you everything”http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/01/graphic-novel-the-boxer-hertzko-haft-reinhard-kleist/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2015/01/graphic-novel-the-boxer-hertzko-haft-reinhard-kleist/#commentsFri, 02 Jan 2015 23:11:15 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=2962

Several of us at the Jewish Museum Berlin have observed that, over the last few years, the market for young adult literature has begun to demonstrate a growing interest in the subject of Nazism and the Holocaust. In the coming weeks, we will be introducing contemporary and classic works on this topic that we have read and discussed together.

What happened to the people who survived the concentration camps – what was life like afterwards? For their families, their children, the survivors themselves?

Alan Scott Haft’s father Hertzko Haft was a vicious and violent man, the polar opposite of what we would consider today to be a “good father.” Many years passed before Alan Scott Haft understood – and he didn’t really want to know – why his father was that way.

At some point he learned a little more:

“One of these days I’m going to tell you everything,” was the cryptic hint his father dropped during the only vacation the family ever went on together. It took another forty years for Hertzko Haft to actually tell his son everything: the story of his youth as the youngest of eight children in the Polish city of Belchatow, the German invasion, and the smuggling business his brothers got into to stay afloat.

Hertzko tells his son about his first girlfriend and fiancée, Leah. He describes the restrictions, the harassment, and the violent abuse that Jews were increasingly subjected to. Above all, he tells him about the period of time he spent in the concentration camp: he survived by boxing in brutal fights staged by the SS mostly between starving prisoners. When he learned after the liberation that Leah was living in America, he decided that he too should emigrate. He continued to box, and became famous. He wanted everyone to know that he had survived. Especially Leah.

Not to give away any more of the book, but we will just add that Hertzko Haft’s story is brutal and bloodcurdling. Alan Scott Haft wrote it down and published it in 2006 with the title “Harry Haft – Auschwitz Survivor, Challenger of Rocky Marciano.” The book came out in German in 2009 as “Eines Tages werde ich alles erzählen. Die Überlebensgeschichte des jüdischen Boxers Hertzko Haft.”

On the basis of Alan Scott Haft’s biography, Reinhard Kleist turned this unbelievable story into a graphic novel. His pictures – direct but nuanced – convey the violence, the brutality, and the despair.

The last pages of the book are dedicated to an essay by the sports journalist Martin Krauß, who writes about the boxers and fights in concentration camps and about Haft’s later life, with photos from his son’s personal collection.

“The Boxer” moved and impressed us in a way that few books on the subject of Nazis and the Holocaust have and we warmly recommend it to every willing reader over the age of 14.

PS: The jury of the German Young Adult Literature Prize was also taken with Reinhard Kleist’s graphic novel about Hertzko Haft and selected it as the best non-fiction book of 2013.

Last week, museum benefactor Fred Kranz accepted our invitation to participate in two workshops in our archives. He met with two classes of schoolchildren, one from Döbeln in Saxony and the other from Berlin’s Tegel district. It was the fifth time in recent years that Mr. Kranz – who was born in Berlin in 1938 – came back from the USA to speak to students and their parents about his life. The Kranz family, which consisted of Fred and his parents, survived the war living on a farm that belonged to a former employee of his father, in the village of Kallinchen on Motzener See (Lake Motzen) in Brandenburg.

In 2004, Fred Kranz donated a collection of documents and photographs to the museum that provide an impressive record of Jewish life in the years immediately following the war. During his most recent visit, he gave us a very special – a truly unique – object. Here is the story of this piece, in his words:

The origin of the medallion with the image of the saint

In the autumn of 1942, my parents and I were living in Berlin’s Mitte district at Fehrbelliner Straße 79. I was just four years old and I wanted to run around and play, like other children my age. There was in fact a playground in our neighborhood, in the same place known today as Teutoburger Platz. But Jews were not allowed to use it.

Since my mother wanted, in spite of everything, to get me out into the fresh air, she took the Star of David off of her coat and proceeded with me to the playground. While I played, she sat on a bench and looked on. As she later told me, she maintained an appearance of complete calm and behaved just as the other mothers did, although inwardly she was terrified of being recognized and denounced. I have to say, I never noticed her fear as I played with the other children.

On one of these trips to the playground, a man slowly approached my mother. She became extremely frightened but was careful not to show it. She had the feeling that this was an agent of the Gestapo. The man then passed – very close to her, very slowly, without looking at her or saying hello. And as he went by, without anyone else seeing, he suddenly pressed something into her hand. In those few seconds she heard him utter the Hebrew words “Al tirah avdi Yaakov!” (אל תירא עבדי יעקב) Before my mother could register her shock, the man had disappeared.

It was only when we arrived safely at home that my mother saw – and was astonished by – what the man had slipped to her: it was a medallion with an image of a saint (probably Mary). It hung on a chain and was partly encased in leather. Its worn down face suggested how often it had been used for prayer.

My mother saved the medallion and brought it with her, when we left Berlin in December of 1942 to hide in so-called ‘illegality’ in Brandenburg until the end of the war. I have kept it since her death, and I’m happy now to be able to pass it on to the Jewish Museum Berlin, where it can contribute to the history of how the Jewish people of Berlin were persecuted. For my mother and me, this medallion was always a symbol of hope and of brotherly love despite the horrifying circumstances of that time when it came to us.

As it happens, the Hebrew exclamation that the stranger spoke quietly to my mother in the park came from the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapter 46, verse 28. It is translated in the English scriptures like this: “Yet do not be afraid, Jacob my servant, for I will save you.”

Fred Kranz

We are very grateful to Fred Kranz for the donation of this remarkable object.

Kurt Roberg (*1924) made a bequest to the Jewish Museum Berlin this year, which comprised among other things a stamp-album—one of the very few items in Roberg’s possession when he fled Berlin for Lisbon then New York in May 1941. Jewish emigrés were forbidden to take their belongings with them out of Germany so Roberg came to see the album as a symbol of his personal triumph over the National Socialist dictatorship.

It is a simple folder containing loose sheets to which stamps are attached by paper hinges, between index sheets classifying various countries in alphabetical order.

My task, once the stamp album had been handed over to the Jewish Museum Berlin and inventoried by a curator, was to establish which measures would be necessary to guarantee its preservation. In order to safeguard the album’s history and hence its specific characteristics, I opted for cautious, unobtrusive conservation. My plan was only to stabilize the existing substance, not to try to repair or remove every last trace of its defects. I thus ruled out any measures that would have made the object look “as good as new.”

Examination of the album’s condition revealed that, in addition to visible tiny tears in several of the dog-eared sheets, the stamps themselves would have to be secured. The adhesive on the paper hinges had dried out over the years and it seemed likely the stamps would detach and be lost during future use of the album.

The adhesiveness of each hinge was accordingly checked and, if necessary, refixed; and fine Japanese paper was used to mend the tears.

Regarding the folder itself, alone the rear cover had survived and it too was slightly torn and also buckled. We decided solely to secure its present state in order to preserve also these traces of the object’s history.
The next question, once conservation was complete, was how to store the album and maintain public access to it yet simultaneously minimize the risk of deterioration or damage. We decided for a custom-made, long-time stable, corrugated cardboard archive box.

The album can therefore now be safely transported and is protected from dust, light and mechanical damage.
Additional inner protection was designed for the album itself, so as to ensure that the index tabs and the binder’s particularly fragile cardboard cover would be adequately protected from mechanical damage, during storage, transport and use. The inner protection was expressly not affixed to the binder so it can be easily removed when the album goes on display.

Until that day comes, however, Kurt Roberg’s well-traveled stamp collection will remain optimally stored in aclimate controlled depot, where the air temperature is 18°C and the relative humidity 50%.

http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/11/the-world-in-miniature/feed/0“Remember, remember…” a date in Novemberhttp://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/11/remember-remember-a-date-in-november/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/11/remember-remember-a-date-in-november/#commentsTue, 04 Nov 2014 23:05:27 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=2492The 9th of November was not a day of national commemoration in England, where I grew up. We had to

“Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot…”

The Gunpowder Plot Conspirators, unknown engraver, ca. 1605-1606

This was the date on which Guy Fawkes, a Catholic renegade, dramatically failed to blow up London’s House of Lords. This cultural memory has been faithfully preserved for over 400 years. However, the 9th of November never went unremarked in our household. It was always referred to in German with a shudder: “Kristallnacht,” a name and concept for which no English equivalent exists.

Moving to Germany in 2001, I was surprised to discover that the 9th of November was indeed a day when the organized pogroms against Jews in Germany in 1938 were discussed in the media and commemorative events were held. Appropriate terminology was the subject of earnest debate: “Kristallnacht” (“the night of broken glass”) was deemed too poetic, the epithet downplaying the brutality of the events. “Reichskristallnacht” (“the imperial night of broken glass”) was a potentially better term, as it was clearer that the crimes were state sanctioned and nationwide. “Reichspogromnacht” (“the imperial pogrom night”) gave a truer sense of the violence and murders that took place. But then again, shouldn’t the term “Nacht” (night) be completely reconsidered, as the events did not take place on a single evening, but over two days? Such discussions were foreign to me.

The 9th of November is a date of historical confluence in Germany, combining the November Revolution of 1918, the Beer Hall (Hitler) Putsch of 1923, Reichspogromnacht and, most recently, the fall of the Berlin Wall. I noted that, over the years, the commemoration of Reichspogromnacht receded into the background. It was overshadowed by stories relating to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the GDR, which is already 25 years in the past. With a new generation, events of historical significance were being replaced by more recent events and layers of history concealing what had come before.

In Judaism, most national calamities have notably fallen on the same date: the 9th day of the Hebrew month of Av. These include the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem, the subsequent exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel and the expulsion of Jews from various countries. For Jews, the events do not replace what came before, although they are centuries apart, they coexist in Jewish cultural and historical memory.

Which historical memories prevail today in the Berlin neighborhood of Lichtenberg? Back in 1905, local Jews founded a small, backyard synagogue here in the Frankfurter Allee. They commissioned colorful stained glass windows, one of which featured a large Star of David and the date of the synagogue’s founding, inscribed in Hebrew.

The congregation grew, leaving the premises and the windows behind in 1934. The building was no longer a synagogue, but the Star of David window remained in place. The Stadtmission of the Protestant Church moved in during the 1940s and under the GDR regime, the windows were carefully removed and placed in the attic, where they gathered decades of dust. When rediscovered, the complete set was donated to the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2003. It is quite miraculous that the window with Jewish iconography was unscathed on Reichspogromnacht and the set appears to be the only group of synagogue stained glass windows in Berlin to have survived intact. They remain as silent witnesses to historical events and the changing use of the building, which now houses a lively children’s indoor playground.

It must be possible for the singular and parallel strata of historical events to be remembered and preserved in some way, without obliterating the past.

“Remember, remember the 5th of November, gunpowder, treason and plot; for there is a reason why gunpowder and treason should ne’er be forgot.”

A cordial welcome, the wafting flavors of a freshly-cooked meal, a light-drenched room with a high ceiling, full of brightly-colored books and pictures, and a piano with a sign-post ‘to Australia’ sitting on it… My first encounter with Deborah Wargon in her live-in atelier in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood is a far cry from the rather severe, somber associations that the term ‘testament enforcer’ brings up for me. Wargon – a musician as well as visual and theater artist born in Melbourne in 1962 – describes herself this way on the package insert that comes with the small-scale artworks that she created for the art vending machine in our permanent exhibition. Those artworks bear the title “The Legacy of Friede Traurig” – where Friede Traurig doubles as a proper name and, in German, to mean peace sorrowful. And Deborah Wargon, who is best known for her paper cuttings inside former insect cases, says that she would rather be sorrowful.

With a little good luck, you may get one of her works from the vending machine: for instance, a little human figurine made of rail track ballast (gravel), wire, and newspaper. Aside from the expressive name Friede Traurig, the materials invoke woeful stories of train transports and barbed wire fences, particularly because the newspapers she used are from the Second World War. But for the artist, it’s clearly not only about the specific time the Nazis were in power and the Shoah. It’s also about the legacies, the inheritance, the stories that we all carry with us. She explains her choice of materials: “For me, wire is a fascinating material. It’s also used for cages. So you can use to suggest the ways that we’re all captive.” The rail track gravel, which normally lies on the ground, relates for Wargon to the ground that we all walk on, as descendants of the people who came before us. “Besides, in both German and English there’s the expression ‘to sweep something under the rug’”. The gravel, or grit, that we bring into the house on the soles of our shoes, and then sweep under the rug, stands for something that we don’t want to face and deal with.

The gravel stone that’s incorporated into the figurines thus also represents the burden of legacies. The individually-made pieces each show that this burden can appear all over, in a person’s head, their heart, stomach or belly. Each figurine is provided with the cheerful tongue-in-cheek suggestion “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
I was convinced immediately that the artist, who gives an infectious fun-loving impression, does hope to build something unique and life-affirming on these bewildering layers of history and legacy.

To accompany the pieces in the art vending machine, Wargon wrote a fairy tale – that also ends by awakening hope and is teeming with ideas from the discourse on memory. Her great-great-grandmother was in fact named Friede Traurig. In the same way that the name sounds like an allegory, she uses the form of a fairy tale to validate the artwork beyond her own biography, unlocking her interpretations of the art for others. For example, from my own reading of it, I could see in the motif of giving birth as a metaphor, among other things, for the creative process of an artist:

“A long, long time ago, time came to the womb and spoke to it, saying that now was the right time to give birth. And so it happened that the water broke and the womb brought legacy into the world.”

It was in face like this for her, answered the artist to this inquiry: she always finds herself ‘pregnant’ with ideas for artworks before she brings them into the world. All told, she is surprised when some people here in Germany tell her that her art is so ‘feminine’. After all she works with human bodies in her paper cutting – masculine as well as feminine forms.

I glanced at a paper cutting on the wall, a picture of two babies still connected to their mother by their umbilical cords. Wargon tells me that her artistic preoccupation with motherhood also has something to do with her Jewish identity, which she’s grappled with intensively in the last few years. Motherhood (especially of children who didn’t come) was already an important issue for biblical matriarchs like Sara and Rebecca.

Wargon’s second piece for the art vending machine also emerges from her addressing her Jewish identity. This one has the title “Eye of God” and it’s a piece of rail track ballast wrapped in a thicker and shinier wire, that sort of brings to mind a model of an atom. “I wasn’t raised religious and I don’t believe in God. When I read the ten commandments, they seem rather vain and patriarchal – and have something of Big Brother about them. So God also belongs to the gravel-ground on which I’ve built my identity as a modern Jew – only, like the singular self-contained atom, he stays inaccessible to me.”

Mirjam Bitter, Media

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/09/perplexing-legacy/feed/0Small, Yet Packs a Punch…http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/07/small-yet-packs-a-punch/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/07/small-yet-packs-a-punch/#commentsThu, 10 Jul 2014 13:48:13 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=2191Or: How 300 Artifacts from our Collection Were Turned into a Cabinet Exhibition about the First World War

Our exhibition “The First World War in Jewish Memory” opened last week. It is based primarily on collections donated to the Jewish Museum by German-Jewish families and each exhibit tells a very personal story.
In total, 176 exhibits were selected, researched and arranged as a visual narrative by eight curators, six restorers, two exhibition technicians, a translator and a graphic artist. So, even before I mention our numerous willing helpers in the wings, in particular the student assistants and the Museum caretaker, this sounds like a big team for a big exhibition. In fact, our joint endeavor culminated in a small cabinet exhibition relating to the First World War, which can be viewed until 16 November in the Rafael Roth Learning Center.

Our first task was to decide which exhibits even came into question. Since we wanted to draw exclusively on in-house collections, we were at least spared the trouble of researching and arranging the loan of objects held by other museums and institutions. Nevertheless, we still had to choose from among the 3,000 objects held alone in the Jewish Museum’s collections of First World War memorabilia. One object made it into the exhibition just in time: the small box with the label “Feldpost 1914–15,” which is on display at the rear of the showcase, arrived to our complete surprise in a package from Uruguay only ten days before the opening. This box is thus the most recent acquisition on show in the exhibition.

Once the selection process was complete, the real work began. All the exhibits were taken to the restoration department and, since the majority were documents, the paper conservators had an especially heavy workload. Then came the photo shoot, so that exhibits would be available for online viewing from the day the exhibition opened. Texts were written, edited and translated, laid out by a graphic artist and then printed. Countless minor decisions had to be made and coordinated: How long should the text about each exhibit be? Which material should be used for labels, and which color? And in which font should the text be set? It was rapidly decided that the display cabinets should be lined with black fabric—but, of course, with a certified black fabric that would not prove detrimental to the exhibits on display. Three days before the opening, we were ready to begin setting up. Even though the sequence and approximate position of each exhibit had been decided in advance, further fine-tuning was necessary in order to establish the exact interrelation of graphics, letters from the front, labels and the like. For two and a half days our conservators were kept busy positioning the exhibits precisely as the curators intended. As project coordinator, I accompanied this entire process and thus had a unique opportunity to familiarize myself in greater detail with our collections.

Although individual biographies are not the explicit exhibition focus, closer inspection, especially of the numerous documents, brings personal fates to the fore. I was particularly moved by three objects that seem initially, quite unremarkable yet which throw light on the tragedy of early twentieth-century German-Jewish biographies. I’m talking about the three certificates awarded in combination with an Order of Merit to Herbert Meyer, Herbert Swallow and Louis Simon for their respective services to the nation as front-line soldiers in the First World War. Hindenburg introduced this medal in 1934 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the First World War—and to honor not only non-Jewish but also Jewish veterans. It was awarded only on request and the certificates in our possession show that applications for the medal were submitted between 1935 and 1937 not only in Berlin, but also in Paris and Tehran. Recipients in the latter cases filed applications with their local German consulate—after having been forced to flee persecution by the very country for which they had fought and risked their lives only twenty years earlier.

Mariette Franz, Museum Assistant

PS: Details of these certificates and other exhibits will be available shortly in a video-clip format on our YouTube channel.

On 15 February 1940, after a four-year wait for an American visa then a successful escape from Nazi Germany, the Engel family, hitherto of Munich, reached the safe shores of Manhattan. In the family’s luggage was memorabilia that the then 13-year-old Alfred Engel was to donate to the Jewish Museum Berlin, decades later, from his father’s estate. It includes rare photographs from the 1910s, a time when Harry Engel (1892–1950) was an active soccer player at FC Bayern Munich.

It was a seemingly nondescript sheet of notepaper that drew my attention to the bundle of objects comprising Harry Engel’s legacy when I was reviewing the content of our archives in preparation for the forthcoming exhibition “The First World War in Jewish Memory.” The note, handwritten in English, stated that Harry had been imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp but that his First World War medal had helped him secure an early release. The note was thus a personal comment on the King Ludwig Cross, a Bavarian Order of Merit awarded as a “token of commemoration and recognition of those who during this war have performed with particular merit for the army or for the general welfare of the homeland through official and voluntary activities” and that Harry Engel took with him into exile.

Of course, to what extent the Order actually did help Harry Engel secure an early release from the concentration camp to which he had been admitted on 10 November 1938 can no longer be verified. The brief note does attest, however, that this is the story the family members associate with the war medal. It is hence an extraordinary document and, from our present perspective, as important as the Order itself.

Like a magnifying glass, it brings sharply into focus those perceptions of the First World War handed down within German-Jewish families. Memories of that war are closely interwoven with what happened between 1933 and 1945: the families’ sense of being an integral part of German society and their subsequent exclusion from it are irrevocably linked. It is a godsend for us, the museum, to have found succinct yet irrefutable evidence of these conflicting associations in the form of a handwritten note, a tangible object apt for display. They are commonly reflected in the personal histories recounted by friends of the Jewish Museum and then documented of course, but visual evidence of them is a rarity. (Tim Grady, author of The German-Jewish Soldiers of the First World War in History and Memory, a book I can highly recommend, will present his research on 3 September 2014, here in the Museum.)

Moreover, not only the Order and the note, but also the football photos from the Engel collection are perfect gems. The FC Bayern Munich celebrates its centenary this year and its archive expressed great interest in the photos when I made enquiries there about Harry Engel. He is certainly no stranger to the archive but his fortunes later in life were largely unknown and—given that plans are afoot to document past players’ biographies—access to his material would be welcomed. According to player stats, Engel played in a total of 104 games in the years 1913–1919 and ranked permanently among the regular first team players from July 1915 onwards. Two of the photos in our collection can also be found in a commemorative brochure published on the 25th anniversary of FC Bayern in 1925—it too was in Harry Engel’s emigration luggage. His name is mentioned in it several times.

The name Engel cropped up again in December 1934, this time in FC Bayern’s guestbook. Then, finally, a brief obituary in the Association’s club newsletter of 29 November 1951 recalled the deceased as “a nice guy and a sportsman in the old tradition.” And it therefore suddenly struck me as most fitting that everyone is raving about football at the moment while we are busy with preparations for the soon to be opened cabinet exhibition about the First World War in Jewish memory.

Leonore Maier, Collections

PS: I sincerely thank the FC Bayern Archive “Erlebniswelt” for the above information on player statistics, the guestbook and the club newsletter.

The financial crisis of 2007 had an impact both on the countries of Western and Eastern Europe. The złoty may still glitter but it has long since ceased to be the “golden coin” Polish currency was originally named for. Unemployment and stagnant economic growth, rising real estate prices and declining purchasing power have put the brake on Poland’s economic recovery. The Netherlands has likewise been in recession for years. Declining competitiveness, private debts, state-subsidized home ownership, the low retirement age and the expensive health care system have fed uncertainty and repeatedly paved the path to success for the Freedom Party of the populist xenophobe Geert Wilders.

The Polish letter of offer as we received it.

This downward spiral in state treasury and personal funds led a couple of Polish resp. Dutch wheeler-dealers to scrape the barrel for a bilateral business model. Crafty Dariusz Woźniok and his fly-by-night Dutch client somehow managed to get their hands on infantrymen’s photos from the Second World War—whether as thieves or buyers it is impossible to say. Maybe they were embittered by the fact that no share in the tidy profits made from material goods ever came their way, from the export of Polish geese, strawberries, potatoes and beetroot, for example, or of Dutch cheese and tulips. Maybe they hatched their business plan in an Amsterdam coffee shop and had simply smoked one hash pipe too many. Whatever the case, they figured: “It was a sure bet that snapshots of ghettos and so-called ‘Jewish actions’ in early 1940s Poland could be sold off as ‘Holocaust-ware’ to Jewish Museums—so why not make the most of an historic windfall?”

Like Lolek and Bolek they set to work: on behalf of his client, an unnamed “Dutch citizen,” Dariusz Woźniok dispatched an offer to addresses all over the world, some of which he copied incorrectly from the Internet: to various Jewish museums and presumably also to private collectors. The letter was written in Polish and had neither a letterhead nor date—“but it’s bound to arrive,” Dariusz must have thought; “and anyone who takes an interest in the Holocaust also understands Polish.”

Front and rear view of one of the photographs

Said windfall comprises around 150 photographs and a handful of objects, such as plain Kiddush cups, charred tefillin, dirty kippas, threadbare bags, and stained prayer shawls, mostly fairly old although neither date of origin nor provenance were stated. A CD containing photographs of the front and rear view of each object was enclosed as proof. A red thread had been laid across each of the photographs so as to up the chances of claiming copyright fees, should the photos ever be reproduced. On the assumption that the institutions approached would all be avid to acquire such material it was proposed that the “delicate matter” be dealt with by written auction—and in total exclusivity, without the involvement of any certified auctioneers. Interested parties were to submit written offers to 4651 HG Steenbergen, the address given in the letter. At 3 000.00 euros per photo, the two gentlemen were reckoning with total booty of up to 450 000.00 euros. It goes without saying that the size of the transaction prompted both Dariusz Woźniok (or whoever may have been hiding behind that name), and his anonymous client to insist on absolute confidentiality. Their paranoia does not mean that no one is out to get them.

Cilly Kugelmann, Program Director

]]>http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2014/05/lolek-and-bolek/feed/0“It was then that I saw the tortured stand before their tormentors”http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/12/it-was-then-that-i-saw-the-tortured-stand-before-their-tormentors/
http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/2013/12/it-was-then-that-i-saw-the-tortured-stand-before-their-tormentors/#commentsFri, 20 Dec 2013 10:00:49 +0000http://www.jmberlin.de/blog-en/?p=1625… the Auschwitz Trial Began 50 Years Ago Today

On 20 December 1963, Federal Germany’s largest and longest-lasting trial to date of crimes committed in National Socialist concentration and extermination camps opened in the council chamber of Frankfurt’s Römer, the city hall. On trial were twenty-two former staff members who had worked between 1941 and 1945 at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The highest-ranking defendant and last commandant of the camp, Richard Baer, had died just before the trial began. Many others did not face charges at all, not least because almost all crimes dating from the Nazi era were already time-barred—even homicide.

Since the Federal German legislature had not anchored the Allies’ postwar trials in Federal German law, trial proceedings in Frankfurt am Main—and likewise all subsequent trials of Nazi crimes—were based on the Penal Code of 1871. Consequently the only charges made were those of murder, and of aiding and abetting murder; and the court, under the guidance of the presiding judge Hans Hofmeyer, was accordingly obliged to find whether defendants had been personally involved in acts of murder, that is to say, had broken the law.

The penal proceedings filed under the number 4 KS 2 /63, which went down in history as the Auschwitz Trial, had been planned and prepared well in advance by Fritz Bauer, Solicitor General of the State of Hesse. The trial lasted twenty months, twice as long as originally planned, and received broad media coverage. German and international media ran more reports than ever before on the systematically planned mass murder of concentration camp prisoners, as well as on those who had willingly perpetrated the crime or been involved in it in some way. They thereby turned the spotlight on the testimony given by the 211 Auschwitz survivors who took the witness stand.

On 20 December 1963 Hessischer Rundfunk devoted its Hessenschau newsreel to the first day in court: a thirteen-minute feature during which the former Auschwitz prisoner Franz Unikower formulated in an astoundingly sober way, what the survivors expected from the trial:

“[…] it was not a thirst for vengeance that motivated us when this long-prepared trial began. It is, for us, a feeling of tragic satisfaction that now, after so many years, evidence is being gathered in great detail, about who was involved in the terrible crimes committed at the Auschwitz camp, and to what extent.”

The screenings integrated in the “On Trial” chapter of our permanent exhibition includes this Hessenschau newsreel, in which the testimony of Franz Unikower can be seen, as well as the packed public gallery of the Frankfurt courtroom. It is estimated that 20,000 people attended the trial. Among them were many writers and intellectuals such as Hannah Arendt, Inge Deutschkron, Marie Luise Kaschnitz, Henry Miller, Robert Neumann, Horst Krüger, and Peter Weiss. Their texts show how harrowing the statements of the survivors and the reactions of the accused must have been. Peter Weiss, in his “Vorübung zum dreiteiligen Drama divine commedia” [Preliminary Exercise for a Divina Commedia Drama in Three Parts], which was first published in German in Rapporte, Frankfurt/Main 1981 [1968], p. 133 f., wrote that:

“It was then that I saw the tortured stand before their tormentors,
The last survivors facing those who had condemned them to death […]
Nameless on both sides, mere leftovers of a thorough purge,
Only stammering, uncomprehending folk,
Up in front of a court investigating grim and deliquescent acts of cruelty […].”

The Auschwitz Trial marks a caesura. It sparked a process that was much more important than the trial itself: the Federal Republic of Germany’s process of dealing with its Nazi past.